Studio Pro: Comping

Screen 1: By default, if you record multiple takes on the same track, Studio Pro stores them as Takes and lets you choose which one to play.

There’s more than one way to comp the perfect take in Studio Pro...

Comping is probably the reason why God created the DAW. She was so fed up with all that tedious tape splicing just to nail a vocal within the allotted studio time that the great creation refineries were stoked up and put to work crafting the binaries to enable digital audio editing. In these enlightened times, comping is so embedded in the modern workflow that it’s hard to believe anyone could get frustrated with it. So, what is comping and how does Fender Studio Pro handle it?

Comping, or compiling, is the process of stitching together a fantastic performance from the best parts of several other performances. It’s building a single perfect take out of a number of takes, to create the illusion that the artist performed the entire part perfectly. It can be used lightly to correct a bum note, or wildly to dissect every take into syllables and rebuild the whole track piece by piece. What’s for sure is that it’s made finding that perfect performance so much easier, and you can worry about being authentic on the live tour.

It’s most commonly used with vocals, where you might loop a section of a song and record multiple takes from which you can choose the best, or choose parts of several takes to form the final take. It can also be used for guitar, piano, or any instrument that you’re recording as audio, and Studio Pro makes it dead easy to work with.

Studio Pro always has more than one way to accomplish something, and when it comes to comping there are two systems in play: Takes and Layers. Comping always happens in the Layers, but recording Takes is usually how you end up in Layers in the first place. You can skip straight to Layers if you prefer to do your Takes in Layers rather than taking Takes into Layers later. Confused? Let me explain.

Takes

Recording Takes in Studio Pro is a natural consequence of how recording works in this DAW. Left to your own devices, you’d probably do this without thinking and may not even know it’s happening.

Nothing is overwritten, nothing is destroyed, it’s all kept as Takes. The great thing is that you can go back and swap the earlier takes back in place of the latest one.

Whenever you record a segment of audio in Studio Pro, it is called a Take. However, that’s never important until you record another one over the top. Recording on a track over the top of audio that’s already there will generate another Take. While you’re doing it, it looks like the audio underneath is being overwritten. And if that’s your intention, then you can consider it so. However, each time you overwrite audio on a track, Studio Pro is saving the...